They point me to the black boy sitting dead on the porch swing with a post up his shirt and they tell me to sit down beside him. “He is your brother,” they say. “You will surely miss him.”

I stare them in their eyes, craning my neck, which makes my too-small suit cling to me all over, and the blazing blinding sun is a half-circle under the raised rim of my hat, and as I ball my fists I feel my cuffs creep slowly up my arms. He stinks. He is a nigger. I will not sit beside that body. I tell them, fairly shouting, “HE IS NOT MY BROTHER.”

I will not sit beside that body.

The camera man arranges lights outside the frame of his picture. He lights a lamp and hangs it up above the swing. He lights and hangs another. I don’t know why he bothers. The body will be a shadow in the print — it will be a silhouette. No matter how he lights the body it will look the same.

Mama kneels to meet my eyes. She fusses with my too-small coat. She says, “Don’t you speak that way of him. You were raised together from the crib. We bought him the day you were born, we bought him so that you might have a friend. He played your games with you, and he joined you in your studies. He was with you every day, in everything, and he slept in the same room, in his own bed beside your bed.” She smooths my cotton collared shirt and pulls a loose thread from beside the topmost button. “Do not tell me that you have no brother.”

(more…)

Watch Your Step

The Gulf may have some oil-soaked oysters, but here in South Carolina, they are still healthy. So healthy in fact that one sliced the hell out of our foot this past weekend. We’ve never seen such neon blood. This incident was followed by an unfortunate step on a broken plank that sent us through the dock. We must say that the board speared into the mud below in spectacular fashion. But while we were gallivanting on an island, people were writing. Today, we have a Czech detective novel, Case Closed. Wars require soldiers, but they require journalists as well. New Criterion reviews Michael Slater’s look into the Dickensian world. Soccer fever is at its pitch, and The Washington Post has five essential World Cup books. And the drama in Emily Dickinson’s life was not that of the theatre. Excuse us while tend to our wounds. – Andrew Geer